NPM Notes

• Manage NPM Dependency Updates
• Executable Global NPM Module
• Providing Command Line Arguments to NPM Scripts
• Package-lock and Semver
• Publish Pre-releases
• Executable NPM Packages and npx
• npm version

Manage NPM Dependency Updates

Check for outdated NPMs in your repo with

npm outdated

++

Update packages with

npm update

Update specific package with

npm update <package-name>

npm update will conform with semver rules defined in package.json. For example, if ~1.2.0 is defined, npm update will:

• install 1.2.4
• but will not install 1.3.0

++

But sometimes we want to bump package.json semver rules, for example from ~1.2.0 to ~1.3.0. This can be done with a global npm npm-check-updates:

ncu -u <package-name>

Full doc here

Source: https://stackoverflow.com/a/23980257

Executable Global NPM Module

https://medium.com/jspoint/creating-cli-executable-global-npm-module-5ef734febe32

Another example with Typescript: https://walrus.ai/blog/2019/11/typescript-cli/

Providing Command Line Arguments to NPM Scripts

Providing argv arguments to node app:

node app.js something1 --something2

Setting up an NPM script might look like the following within package.json:

scripts: {
  "aScript": node app.js
}

To run that NPM script with command line arguments:

npm run aScript -- something1 --something2

We simply need a double-dash followed by the arguments we want passed in.

Package-lock and Semver

https://medium.com/coinmonks/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about-package-lock-json-b81911aa8ab8

npm semver calculator: https://semver.npmjs.com/

Publish Pre-releases

1. Insert pre-release version in package.json

// example
"version": "1.2.2-beta.0"

2. Publish with custom tag. Here, we will use next tag to follow npm conventions. This tag is important:

• To prevent user from installing pre-releases when installing npm with npm install package. This installation command will pull packages tagged with latest.
• To allow user to install pre-releases with npm install package@next

npm publish --tag next

Executable NPM Packages and npx

A good StackOverflow answer on this topic https://stackoverflow.com/a/52018825/5204647

npm version

See this post for usage examples.